The American Theatre Critics Association, Inc. is the only national association of professional theatre critics. Our members work for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and on-line services across the United States. Membership is open to all who review theatre professionally, regularly and with substance for print, electronic or digital media.

Jack Lyons covers the theatre scene for the Desert Local News. Jack is based in Desert Hot Springs and covers the entire Coachella Valley and the rest of Southern California including select productions in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and San Diego.

Katherine Luck writes news and reviews of theatre in Seattle, Portland, and around the Puget Sound at Pacific NW Theatre.

Jonathan Mandell reviews Broadway, Off-Broadway and independent theater productions, and covers theater for a variety of publications, including Playbill and American Theatre Magazine. He blogs at New York Theater and Tweets as @NewYorkTheater.

Andrew McGibbon writes Theatre Opinion, News and Information in TheAndyGram, based in NYC.

Click here for video clips of last year’s $40,000 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Awards at the 37th Humana Festival, including Jim Steinberg, Bill Hirschman and winners Robert Schenkkan, Johnna Adams and Lucas Hnath. NOTE that Schenkkan’s winning play is now on Broadway. NOTE that the 2014 Steinberg/ATCA winners will be announced April 5 at Humana. See six finalists here.*

Elsewhere (off)site: for the website of the Drama section of the (British) Critics’ Circle, click here.

More metaphors, please:“…he falls on this succulent, puffed-up role as if it were a chocolate eclair… . This is not life imitating art. This is art going to bed with life and staying there for the rest of the afternoon. — Anthony Lane, New Yorker review of “The French Minister.”“Now is the winter of our Discount Tents” — sign in the window of Richard III Camping Goods, somewhere in Leicester.”

“[C]riticism, which by now should have evolved from a one-sided conversation … to a full-fledged back-and-forth between audience and critic, still drags its knuckles. Over in the online sports section of my particular newspaper, the threads are lively, angry, and impassioned. In the political and local sections, they’re horrific cesspools of blatant racism and sexism that continue for pages. But here on the performing arts page, save for the occasional response from someone associated with a production that received a negative review, they’re empty.” — Wendy Rosenfield in HowlRound, Apr. 1, 2013.

Hooray for The Onion: “Continuing in its mission to support excellence across a range of artistic disciplines, the National Endowment for the Arts announced Friday a new initiative allocating $80 million to discourage no-talent hacks from engaging in creative endeavors.” Read it here.

Inductee Sir Trevor Nunn walked around, star struck, looking up at the walls encrusted with names in raised gold Sam Waterston and family members (Aubrey Ruben photo)letters. Sam Waterston accepted induction by saying, “For me, from the start, the theater [as opposed to TV] has always been ‘it.’ … This honor is, as I take it, for sticking to it.” Kristine Nielsen, veteran of many Christopher Durang plays, inducted the absent playwright (laid low by an accident just suffered performing at Yale) with a catalog of all the bitchy, depressive, psychotic and wildly Playwrights Sara Ruhl (left) and Paula Vogel (Aubrey Ruben photo)funny characters he’s given her to play. And in posthumously inducting Martin Pakledinaz, fellow costume designer Susan Hilferty remembered him “at the flea markets, on his bicycle racing through New York.”

Perhaps the most affecting presentation speech was by playwright Sara Ruhl, doing the honors for her mentor, playwright Paula Vogel.

On inducting Paul Vogel into the Theater Hall of Fame, by Sara Ruhl

I am humbled and honored to introduce Paula Vogel to the Theater Hall of Fame tonight.

She and her plays are fearlessly playful, fiercely generous, radically inclusive, with a kind of incandescent strength. I love how she creates a modern architecture for grief. How she makes personal loss into something formal; how she laughs at terrible things. How she uses gesture and language; and how language can be a mode of alienation but also a source of solace. How she sees theater as a place for memory, and ghosts. I love her love of populism, and for the way she embeds politics in the personal, and the other way around.

The humanity in her work ultimately eclipses the politics of her work, which in the end, I think, is a radical political act, and changes our culture. How I Learned to Drive changed our culture of silence around sexual abuse. It changed us. It changed us individually, as audiences, and it changed the larger culture. I believe that there is a before How I learned to Drive and an after in our culture of silence. The silence became less deafening. Paula gives us strong guides in her plays, just as she gives her students guidance. How I Learned to Drive begins “sometimes you have tell a story so you can teach a lesson.” For Paula, narrative and teaching and wisdom are inextricably bound.

And I do need to mention her teaching, because Paula was my teacher, and the only reason I started writing plays. This is a rare opportunity to thank her. (Thank you, Paula.) In the last decade, when you look at who has won the Pulitzer prize—Quiara Hudes, Nilo Cruz, and Lynn Nottage—so many were Paula’s students. But for Paula, I don’t think prizes are the end-point. I think that her end-point is no less than giving audiences and writers permission to be human through the continuance of the play as an art form. She gives us searing language and imagery to help us explain ourselves to ourselves, to stretch our compassion and our complexity.

She is a true original, a giant of the dramatic form. I am grateful for her plays, for her teaching, her friendship, her life, her wife, and for the fact of sharing this earth with her for a little while.